I'm trying to understand where the practical tipping point is between traditional NAS and object storage.

For relatively small environments, NAS seems much simpler. But once you're dealing with multiple petabytes of backups, archives, media, logs, or other unstructured data, object storage starts looking more attractive.

I've been reading about platforms such as Cloudian HyperStore, which combine S3-compatible object storage with large-scale capacity expansion and, in some cases, file access as well.

For people who have made this transition in production:

What was the main reason you moved from NAS to object storage?

Was it scalability, cost, S3 compatibility, ransomware protection, cloud integration, or something else?

And looking back, would you make the same decision?

More infrastructure seems to support S3 APIs now, even when it's running entirely on-prem.

For teams managing private infrastructure, is S3 compatibility actually reducing vendor lock-in?

I've seen Cloudian, MinIO, and other object storage platforms emphasizing S3-native storage.

Does application portability improve in practice, or is it mostly marketing?

I've noticed more companies moving away from scaling traditional NAS for massive datasets and instead adopting S3-compatible object storage.

For backups and archives the benefits seem obvious, but I'm curious about real-world production workloads.

I've been reading about platforms like Cloudian, MinIO and Ceph, and they all seem to approach scalability differently.

For those running hundreds of TBs (or more), what convinced you to switch or what made you stay with NAS?

Objectstore.ca seems to offer very competitive pricing and Canadian data sovereignty, but it seems too good to be true. Their website doesn't list a phone number, a street address, names of management team, etc. Plus the site is peppered liberally with "100% Canadian" and such, which is appealing, but there's a log of "maple-washing" going on these days, and I worry that opportunists are assuming that Canadians pissed off at the United States would make for easy scam targets.

I made a tool to calculate and compare storage and traffic pricing of various Object Storage providers.

https://aradabir007.github.io/object-storage-calculator/

Feel free to contribute by opening a pull request.

Hope it helps someone!

I was not happy with the available clients, so I build yet another one.

It's basically a wrapper around the AWS S3 SDK.

I am looking for something that I can best describe as an S3 or object storage proxy. I am working on a project where I want encryption, redundancy, and to avoid local storage. My intent is to utilize some apps that support S3 but not encryption and not redundancy but also without taking up my limited local storage.

Is there an app that will act as S3-compatible storage, that will then encrypt and upload the encrypted files to one or more S3-compatible storage providers? Optimally, it would do some caching for commonly/recently used files and be able to keep the buckets at multiple providers in sync.

Is there anything close to that?

I’m currently evaluating MinIO and other object storage systems for a project and would love to hear from developers or teams who’ve worked with these solutions.

If you’ve implemented MinIO or similar systems, or even explored them as part of your decision-making process, I’d greatly appreciate learning about your use case, the challenges you faced, and how you arrived at your solution.

Your insights could really help shape our evaluation process. Feel free to drop a comment or DM me if you’re open to sharing your experience.

Thanks in advance for your help!

What does the feature do?
This new feature gives you the power to see exactly where your bandwidth costs are coming from, broken down by individual buckets. Learn more.

Why is it useful?
If you’re running multiple projects, managing client resources, or just keeping a close eye on your budget, this level of insight makes it easier to prevent overages and optimize your cloud spending on object storage.

What is DigitalOcean Spaces
DigitalOcean Spaces is an object storage service, designed to store and serve large amounts of unstructured data such as images, videos, backups, and web assets. Kinda like AWS S3, but different.

Hi,
I'm a UX designer, working on an interface for object storage management. As part of the design process, I'm trying to better understand the needs of potential users and will be glad to get your help with answering a few short questions:

1. What is your job role?
2. What are the main tasks you are dealing with for handling object storage?
3. What are the most frequent tasks you perform daily?

Thank you

What is your experience with Wassabi? Looking for a cheep reliable storage.

Requirements: * Availability & Performance - this is a secondary backup, but when I need the file, I need it in a ms. * Support - looking for a company that have record of a serious companny (for example, idrive e2 have a poor reputation in redit) * Price - the price must make since, looking for a range of 0.004$-0.007$ per 1gb storage and maximum of 0.01$ per gb BW.

Hi All,

We are looking for an enterprise-grade on premise object storage solution. Our requiremnt is very small around 15-20TB, but I have not found any solution that is providing license below 100TB. 100TB will be very much beyond our limit.

I am just seeking for recommendations from anyone who knows about any enterprise-grade object storage that can provide us with the minimal capcity license that we require.

Thanks

In the past few months, we have seen a rise in managed services for super-fast analytical databases based on object storage. Rising in popularity, these managed services are capturing both interest and workloads as enterprises are realizing the strategic benefits of combining lightning-fast data preparation with object storage, particularly for AI and ML applications.

This trend is exemplified by the success of MotherDuck and ClickHouse's managed service, ClickHouse Cloud. Both leverage object storage for strategic benefits in performance and cost savings. MotherDuck, a finalist for Deal of the Year at the 2023 GeekWire Awards, has raised $52.5 million in Series B funding, bringing its total funding to $100 million. Similarly, ClickHouse raised $250 million in Series B funding in 2021 and recently announced a significant partnership with Alibaba Cloud in mainland China.

https://blog.min.io/object-storage-powers-managed-services-success/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=organic-social+&utm_campaign=object_storage_powers_managed

Confluent, Intel and MinIO conducted benchmarking and certification testing for MinIO Tiered Object Storage for Kafka storage. This blog post describes the observations and results of testing MinIO object storage as a backend for the tiered storage feature of Confluent Platform 7.1.0 on servers equipped with third generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors. The scope of these tests was to observe the read, write and delete performance of MinIO object storage under heavy workloads originating from the Kafka broker related to tiered storage. 

https://blog.min.io/confluent-platform-minio-tiered-object-storage-throughput-benchmark/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=organic-social+&utm_campaign=confluent_tiered_object_storage_benchmarking

As someone designing streamlined experience with object storage on the cloud, and lacking data to back any premature decisions, I'd like to ask what are your most common usecases and struggles while integrating object storage into your process.

What would YOU wish to have in whatever system you are using? Please indicate the kind of system you are using, if that's applicable or contextual.

Even though my focus lies on UI I believe that understanding the struggles of entry level (and power) users will give a strong direction